Sure but if we succeed at mitigating cimate change effects to a reasonable degree, civilization will survive for centuries, during which a reactor that uses itmight become available. It’s a minor problem blown out of proportion, as opposed to CO₂ emissions, which are the opposite.
Even if this were true this doesn’t help with the very real issue that we can’t build the nuclear capacity fast enough whereas renewable energy can be built fast, is already being built, and doesn’t have that problem that needs wishful thinking for it’s solution.
Because batteries aren’t as dangerous as reactors, are still making massive improvements on energy density and seem feasible to me. Doing anything useful with nuclear waste has been discussed for decades and no-one has come forward with any really promising results. The waste has been around for long enough if anyone could have done something productive with it it likely would have happened already.
It’s just an example number. No matter what if you are building a grid that has 0 baseload power generation, you need some amount of storage capacity for each KWh of consumption. We can argue how much you actually need, but the fact remains that when you start storing large amounts of power, which you would need in-order to keep a city running during times of reduced generation, it takes a large amount of space.
In order to demonstrate that, I chose a pretty straight-forward scenario of a city of 1million for just one day. Let’s assume that this amount of stored energy would be sufficient for a 100% renewable grid for say New York City.
So how much energy storage would be needed and how much space would such a storage facility take up?
For the fun of it I did do the calculation. Berlin uses about 12TWh per year. That’s about 33GWh per day.
Assuming an energy density of 450Wh/l (a number car batteries apparently were able to reach 2020) that’s about 80.000 m³.
A soccer field is about 4000 m². So a space of 10 soccer fields with 20m high battery stacks would do that.
Now assume that energy density will have improved in the last 4,5 years and that maybe storage batteries can be different from batteries in cars and that can go down by a lot. Seems reasonable enough for the biggest city in Germany.
The premise of powering a complete city just from one singular facility is a false one. It’s unnecessary to build such a facility. You can build multiple smaller ones to supply sectors of a city according to the needs of that sector. The answer also depends on how smart the usage of the power is. Are people using power when it’s available? Are people trying to use a lot of power when it’s not available but must come from storage? There are so many factors your scenario doesn’t take into account. The answer has to be: it depends.
This also feels a lot like a gotcha question not posed in good faith. Because again: you won’t need to power anything solely from storage. Wind and sun will always supply a base level of energy.
Yeah I’m not convinced that just burying the stuff deep in a hole will do what I think is responsible. That shit stays dangerous for multiple thousands of years. That’s such a long timeframe that we cannot predict what’s going to happen to our society. It is very realistic that we lose the knowledge of the location or even the dangerousness of that stuff. Imagine future people stumbling into this and actually getting something like a curse from an old pharao by weird invisible forces that make you sick.
Another thing about this is that locations that are “good” candidates for this kind of storage are extremely rare. Germany has been looking for a suitable place for the last few decades and didn’t find any yet afaik. And the few places we might have are booked to be filled with all the old waste still sitting in intermediary storage.
Unless we have a reliable way of finding suitable storage places before we start producing more waste it will put us in the same situation we are in now, just worse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
Sure but if we succeed at mitigating cimate change effects to a reasonable degree, civilization will survive for centuries, during which a reactor that uses itmight become available. It’s a minor problem blown out of proportion, as opposed to CO₂ emissions, which are the opposite.
Even if this were true this doesn’t help with the very real issue that we can’t build the nuclear capacity fast enough whereas renewable energy can be built fast, is already being built, and doesn’t have that problem that needs wishful thinking for it’s solution.
Why do you not include city-scale energy storage as wishful thinking? Unlike nuclear reactors, that amount of storage doesn’t exist.
Because batteries aren’t as dangerous as reactors, are still making massive improvements on energy density and seem feasible to me. Doing anything useful with nuclear waste has been discussed for decades and no-one has come forward with any really promising results. The waste has been around for long enough if anyone could have done something productive with it it likely would have happened already.
How big would a battery need to be to power a single city of 1000000 for 1day?
Why would you want to do that? Do you fear that there might be absolutely pitch black days with absolutely zero wind?
It’s just an example number. No matter what if you are building a grid that has 0 baseload power generation, you need some amount of storage capacity for each KWh of consumption. We can argue how much you actually need, but the fact remains that when you start storing large amounts of power, which you would need in-order to keep a city running during times of reduced generation, it takes a large amount of space.
In order to demonstrate that, I chose a pretty straight-forward scenario of a city of 1million for just one day. Let’s assume that this amount of stored energy would be sufficient for a 100% renewable grid for say New York City.
So how much energy storage would be needed and how much space would such a storage facility take up?
For the fun of it I did do the calculation. Berlin uses about 12TWh per year. That’s about 33GWh per day.
Assuming an energy density of 450Wh/l (a number car batteries apparently were able to reach 2020) that’s about 80.000 m³.
A soccer field is about 4000 m². So a space of 10 soccer fields with 20m high battery stacks would do that.
Now assume that energy density will have improved in the last 4,5 years and that maybe storage batteries can be different from batteries in cars and that can go down by a lot. Seems reasonable enough for the biggest city in Germany.
The premise of powering a complete city just from one singular facility is a false one. It’s unnecessary to build such a facility. You can build multiple smaller ones to supply sectors of a city according to the needs of that sector. The answer also depends on how smart the usage of the power is. Are people using power when it’s available? Are people trying to use a lot of power when it’s not available but must come from storage? There are so many factors your scenario doesn’t take into account. The answer has to be: it depends.
This also feels a lot like a gotcha question not posed in good faith. Because again: you won’t need to power anything solely from storage. Wind and sun will always supply a base level of energy.
Yeah I’m not convinced that just burying the stuff deep in a hole will do what I think is responsible. That shit stays dangerous for multiple thousands of years. That’s such a long timeframe that we cannot predict what’s going to happen to our society. It is very realistic that we lose the knowledge of the location or even the dangerousness of that stuff. Imagine future people stumbling into this and actually getting something like a curse from an old pharao by weird invisible forces that make you sick.
Another thing about this is that locations that are “good” candidates for this kind of storage are extremely rare. Germany has been looking for a suitable place for the last few decades and didn’t find any yet afaik. And the few places we might have are booked to be filled with all the old waste still sitting in intermediary storage.
Unless we have a reliable way of finding suitable storage places before we start producing more waste it will put us in the same situation we are in now, just worse.